David7204 wrote...
The Reapers are continually established as being concerned with extinction and nothing else. No autonomous thought or action, no internal disagreement or conflict. It's been very clear from the beginning the Reapers are following something.
Whether that's a computer program, or a set of mandates they came up with themselves, or a physical entity controlling them...I really do not see how that makes any fundamental difference at all. The same motive still exists. The same enemy still exists. The same ending still exists.
All of those things could easily have been kept exactly or near-exactly in place and been explained without the Catalyst. By Harbinger. By another Reaper. By a friendly AI. By the Crucible, perhaps. And people seem to think that would all be fine and dandy.
Sovereign demonstrated autonmous actions by remaining hidden and indoctrinating key agents to do its work while massing an army. Had it been business as usual, he would not have hidden. Sovereign guaged the situation and decided that a stealthy approach would be better over moving in with overwhelming force, as is the Reaper doctrine.
You say the Reapers are following something....... that something is yet to be revealed as the Catalyst, or even hint at the Catalyst as the command and controller. The Reapers could be following Harbinger. They could all be following programming. The possibilites have yet to collapse till we are left with only one possibilty of the driving force of the Reapers living on the Citadel.
This is a big deal. Because if the driving force of the Reapers is within easy reach of every species it is harvesting then, had they known, they could have torn the station apart to find it and stop it.
Think of it this way. If the controller had been Harbinger, then they would have to kill Harbinger to kill the command and control centrol of the Reaper attack. Given the difficulty of killing a Reaper this would have been costly.
If they had known the Catalyst was the command and contorl point. Then they could have targetted it with much less risk to their fleets and with more time to spare, given that they already had the Citadel.
If they knew that the Catalyst existed, but it's command and control function's were distributed across the Reaper mind frame, then destroying the Catlayst would not have made any difference to the war effort. But they wuld have been able to implement greater data protection precaution's to reduce the risk of the Catalyst using the Galactic hub of the galaxy from relaying information tothe Reapers on where best to target for maximum effect.
The point is, it does matter where the Reaper command and control cetnre is, and it does matter what it's capabilities are. Because if the Catlayst is an unknown, then question's like, "why did it not repair the damage the Protheans did and allow the Reapers into the Galaxy, having to rely on Soverign instead"?
This right there is a failure of the writer to develop the Catalyst sufficiently as a character to answer a very important question. Mainly, that if the Catalyst actively wants another harvest, did it not take action because it didn't want to in favour of another option? Or because it was incapable?
I can't help but notice that your argument also noted that the Catalyst is superfluous to the narrative given it's function. So the question persists. Why seat the function of the Catalsyt within it's final design instead of giving them to an established character who does not raise so many issues?
And ehy make the Citadel the home of the Cataltyst and not add the words. "The prothean sabotage disrupted my control of the Keepers, leaving me unable to open the realy to darkspace myself". So that the narrative is given the structure it needs to carry the story.
Narrative is a means of communication, and failing to communicate clearly and precisely allows for the possibility of narrative failures. The story has to carry the observer. The observer cannot be expected to make vast leaps of logic. Fro a writer to expect that is to leave behind a majority of your readers. And writers need to able to reach out with words to as many people as possible in order to looked upon by as many of those people as possible, to be deemed a succesful writer.
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